Drsql.link

As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon at my keyboard, looking for blogs to highlight, I notice something. A lot of people I know have blogs, and a lot of them are not active (or aren’t very active). I won’t name names or anything, but it is a bit depressing.

There are a zillion reasons why people stop blogging, and I respect all the reasons. A lot of them make me happy. I stopped blogging as much when I got a job that was pretty intense in terms of editing and writing. I realized I was missing it this year, and had started to get back into writing again.

When I started back at my old company, my reasons for blogging came rushing back. Keep up, stretch my brain, learn things, stay in the community. I don’t know how much speaking/traveling I will be doing in the future. I can only quantify it as “as much as I can”, but that amount includes a lot of factors. Part of why I went back to my old employer was their deep support for training and us keeping up to date. And I certainly won’t be using everything I may want to learn at my company…certainly not if I don’t learn it first.

My answer: I hope not

Looking through my feeds that haven’t been added to the Feedly Friday list is kind of wild. There are more pretty much more empty feeds that full ones. That doesn’t mean they are dead, just nothing in the past month or so usually. So, people are blogging some, just not like it has been in the past.

I will continue my quest to find new and existing blogs about SQL, and I will do what I can to help people start blogs. In the near future, I am going to launch a new venture to give tips for new and seasoned writers. I will focus on how we make blogging both useful and fun. I know when I started 25 years ago, I never imagined it would become fun to write about anything, but trust me it did.

Less scary than it sounds

The classes about writing, and a lot of the blogs about writing, makes it sound terrible. Like you need to master a language and the oxford comma before you start writing blogs. While it doesn’t hurt to write well, technical blogs are about the content more than the prose.

I mean, how many times have you used a translation tool to read a blog in a language you can’t read. Whether the translation was perfect or even a bit comical…if you learned something, you got what you came for. Make sure you can teach something first, then the rest will follow as you start to actually enjoy the process.

But what about AI

While AI is doing more and more of our searching and blogging for us, it also isn’t going to replace it completely, especially if you realize why you ought to be doing it..

In fact, AI can be the impetus for starting a blog. AI isn’t perfect or nearly as thorough as you can be, and likely never will be…though it is good and is a lot faster than any of us. AI output can also be a great inspiration when it tells you of a new feature you have never used before.

So don’t let AI’s existence be a factor. Sure, your writing will likely find itself into that AI. That isn’t a terrible thing in some ways, since you aren’t really going to be creating something that elevates itself to intellectual property. Hopefully attribution will be more and more prominent in the future and the AI will say “this is the explanation from <fill in reader name here>”, but don’t hold your breath!

It helps when you realize that we blog as much for ourselves as our readers. So don’t let blogging die, do it as much as you can, impart your wisdom to others as best as you can.